During the past 75 years, enormous progress has been made in many fundamental fields of science and technology. In particular, computer science and related sciences and technologies have advanced from simple programs runs on primitive, mechanical computing apparati and early vacuum-tube-based electronic computer systems to modern, complex, highly distributed systems of electronic computers that support many different types of applications and services. The development of extremely fast, multi-processor, distributed computer systems, high-capacity mass-storage devices and systems, virtualization technologies, and the Internet now enable developers, from a single control panel displayed on a remote personal computer, to configure and launch cloud-computing-based data centers containing thousands of virtual servers supporting the execution of many thousands of applications. The development of secure-computing-networking protocols and reliable transaction-processing technologies allow these cloud-computing-based data centers to concurrently carry out enormous numbers of secure transactions with remote users distributed across the world. Even relatively modest personal computers feature mass-storage devices capable of storing terabytes of data. In addition, the emergence of smart phones and tablet devices allows users to connect to cloud-computing facilities through mobile phones and table devices, greatly expanding the reach and accessibility of computing technologies to users.
Basic fields of scientific inquiry, including physics, chemistry, and biology, rapidly developed during the 1700's and 1800's before entering an era of exponential progress in the late 1800's until the present time. The structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (“DNA”) was initially proposed only in the mid 1950's, but quickly led to the elucidation of the genetic code in the 1960's and the development of modern molecular biology and biotechnology in the latter portion of the 20th century. Modern technologies have now made it possible to produce an entire genetic sequence for an individual patient in days or even hours for a cost that will soon be less than a thousand dollars. These technologies are expected to result in broad-based utilization of personal genomics in clinical medicine. Similar advancements are expected to allow the proteins, lipids, polysaccharides, ribonucleic-acid molecules (“RNA”), and other biomolecules to be characterized for individual patients and used for medical diagnosis and treatment. Currently, large research efforts are devoted to characterizing and understanding the microbiome, the complement of microorganisms hosted by human beings that carry out many necessary functions for their human hosts and that greatly affect the health of human beings.
It has long been recognized that progress in the use of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and other broad fields of biopolymer characterization for clinical diagnosis and treatment will necessarily depend on development of computational methods and systems for organizing, storing, searching, aggregating, and distributing the vast quantities of biological information that are becoming accessible for individual patients by modern technologies. While computer-based technologies are already widely used in life-sciences-research and clinical applications, new developments and methods are sought for harnessing the knowledge and information becoming available for individual patients for use by researchers, clinicians, and medical-service providers.